calljdku912fandomcom-20200214-history
Read/Write Web (Mona Jozi)
The Read/Write Web The Read/Write Web, also known as Web 2.0, offers engaging tools and strategies that improve curriculum access for students with special needs. Using the Read/Write Web as Assistive Technology allows students to: *Access the curriculum using multiple methods of access and engagement *Demonstrate what they know independently *Collaborate with their peers in new ways *Be creators of content *Use the tools that they depend upon outside of the school environment = = =Exploring the Read/Write Web= The World Wide Web is a vast and growing network of interconnected "spaces" called information resources. There are spaces for and about anything imaginable. A space may be something as simple as a Web page document containing some text or a website containing many individual Web pages. Various types of documents and files can be linked or embedded using the "Web" including: text, images, audio, video, animation, and other multimedia. In this sense it’s a highly creative and collaborative medium. This Web of hypertext linked documents is accessed via the Internet using a Web browser such as Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, or Opera. The Internet is a global computer network and the Web is a part of the Internet that enables access to information on the network. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, envisioned a collaborative medium and a place where we could all meet and read and write. He named it the Read/Write Web. ' ' THE READ/WRITE WEB IN EDUCATION Our students' realities in terms of the way they communicate and learn are very different from our own. Without question, our ability to easily publish content online and to connect to vast networks of passionate learners will force us to rethink the way we communicate with our constituents, the way we deliver our curriculum, and the expectations we have of our students. The Web also has the potential to radically change what we assume about teaching and learning, and it presents us with important questions to consider: What needs to change about our curriculum when our students have the ability to reach audiences far beyond our classroom walls? What changes must we make in our teaching as it becomes easier to bring primary sources to our students? How do we need to rethink our ideas of literacy when we must prepare our students to become not only readers and writers, but editors and collaborators and publishers as well? And, I think most importantly, how can we as learners begin to take advantage of the opportunities these tools present? at its heart, the implications of this new Web are all about learning first, teaching second. Results of a Net day survey released in March 2005 assert that technology has become "an indispensable tool in the education of today's students." The survey showed that 81 percent of students in Grades 7-12 have e mail accounts, 75 percent have at least one Instant Messenger (1M) screen name, and that 97 percent believe strongly that technology use is important in education. And, the fastest-growing age group for using the Internet is 2 to 5 year olds. This immersion in technology has neurological effects as well. William D. Winn, director of the Learning Center at the University of Washington, believes that years of computer use results in children who "think differently from us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It's as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential" (Prensky, 2001a). In other words, today's students may not be well suited to the more linear progression of learning that most educational systems employ. Most teachers in today's schools, meanwhile, were not surrounded by technology growing up. And the speed with which these technologies have been developed (remember, the Web browser is only 15 years old) means that it's a daunting task for many to catch up to their students.